It is common practice to transport hay and other agricultural products as needed from one location to another as needed. Hay is usually baled into large bales that can weigh several hundred pounds. A bale can have a cylindrical or rectangular geometry and can weigh between fifteen hundred to three thousand pounds. Obviously, the task of moving these enormous bales is outside the realm of pure manual labor. Therefore, an apparatus to retrieve, transport, and unload these enormous bales is required.
Several bale loaders are known in the prior art. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,076,138, 4,249,842, and 4,329,102 disclose various types of round bale loaders and carriers. However, these prior art carriers have loading devices used to scoop the hay bale off the ground and load it into a trailer type structure. This scooping motion can run into difficulty when the hay bales are not on level ground or if the hay bales do not exactly match the dimensions required to perfectly fit into the loading devices of these prior art carriers.
Other prior art hay bale carriers have attempted to overcome these shortcomings but have yet to adequately and efficiently load, unload, and haul hay bales. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,240,259 requires the trailer apparatus to be perfectly positioned beside the hay bale as an upper frame assembly surrounds the hay bale before attempting to lift the hay bale onto the trailer. This perfect positioning requirement is slow and inefficient in the loading of hay bales onto a trailer.
Also, U.S. Pat. No. 6,019,562 attempts to clamp hay bales between gripping arms in order to lift the hay bales onto a trailer. During the course of this clamping the hay bales can slide or fall out of the gripping arms, therefore complicating the loading process.
Thus there is a need in the art for an apparatus to handle, retrieve, transport, and unload large bales of agricultural material.